As an example, one of the next applications I am working on with it is voting (a continuation of my PhD research). You can do things with this that you can't do anywhere else because you've got hundreds of untrusted, uninterested nodes, changing the threat model in a very important way. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any other way to incentivize that without some form of payment system, which is why it is intrinsic to this chain.
It is fundamental to safe and fair commerce to be able to not be tracked in the ways we care about folks not being tracked. I want to do things like read my news subscription without them being a data vampire that tracks how long my eyes hover over each paragraph of every story then sells that to some advertiser. I also don't want my credit card company selling my purchase history to some government that then uses that information to decide if I am allowed to enter their country 15 years from now.
In other words, the project is not trying to be a slower, less private version of a credit card. We do not want to be just another privacy coin or utility for some pre-existing internet service and, unlike other mixnet projects, our goal is a much more ambitious resistance to global adversary threat model. We want to enable folks to do things over the internet with similar properties and experience as buying milk from the corner store with real money. We might not get there, but that's my vision for what we are trying to achieve.